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does it follow that, after this life is ended, the Christian will have absolutely nothing whatever to hope for? Will it be nothing for the departed spirits of the faithful to anticipate the resurrection of their bodies, and to look forward to the triumphant issues of the coming judgment ? And even when these glorious events have been consummated, will there not still remain the animating prospect of continually augmenting knowledge, un- ceasingly advancing happiness, and progressively increasing spiritual excellence to all eternity? We must either suppose that all that heaven has to give is to be enjoyed at once by the spirits of the redeemed when first they are translated thither, and that there is no progress of any kind to be afterwards made by them from glory to glory; or else we must allow that there is still something in reserve for them, besides what they at first attain, as a fit and proper object of Hope.1
5. Faith, hope, and love, these three represent the spiritual or Christian life, called also the eternal life, in the soul of man. It is this that has in its history and essential nature the witness of permanence. St. Paul found comfort in the evident progress from the more imperfect to the less imperfect which is to be traced in a part of our human nature. But he also derived comfort, and the more indispensable comfort, from contemplating the signs and working in man of the perfect and eternal Divine nature. And in order to realize that this which seemed to him best in man was really unchanging, he must have looked at it as he did at the changing forms of mental conception, in the stage of human childhood. In the child — he implies, if he does not fully affirm — he found the spiritual affections at least as admirable as in the man. These things, faith and hope and love, he per- ceived, manifest themselves with heavenly beauty in the young ; they are also the signs of God's truest presence in the instructed and experienced man, and they will stand the shock of death, and remain with us, in virtue of their imperishable and eternal nature, in the dimly imagined world that lies on the other side of the grave.
If So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin verses, and called them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated. Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant at the right time,
* T. J. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross, 349.
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or build with a steady hand ? Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and deed ? Indeed it is, with some, nay, with many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope ; but we have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy ; and their intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall abide, for them and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion ; shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by temptation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear ; — shall abide with us Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made ashamed by the shadows that betray : — shall abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these ; the abiding will, the abiding name of our Father. For the greatest of these is Charity.1
i. Faith Abides.
1. There is a common saying, which ninety out of a hundred people think comes out of the Bible, that " faith is lost in sight." There is no such teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect, faith is the antithesis of sight. St. Paul does say, " We walk by faith, not by sight." But that antithesis refers only to part of faith's significance. In so far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in operation when we shall know even as we are known, and see Him as He is. But the essence of faith is not the absence of the person trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person, present or absent. And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the darknesses of earth. For ever and ever will dependence on God in Christ be the life of the glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer to casting off the state of filial depend- ence which is, and ever will be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith " abides."
2. But how can faith, which is the evidence of things not seen, remain in the very presence of the realities themselves ?